What makes Oppenheimer so exhilarating is the extent to which everything it does feels indivisible from everything it’s about. Photo / Universal Pictures
How does Christopher Nolan’s Best Picture favourite compare to the likes of Amadeus or Marie Antoinette? Critic weighs in.
The biopic is a peculiar beast: the closer you look at the genre, the less it seems like a genre at all. Of course, there’s an instantly recognisable formula to many of them – the Oscar-friendly hybrid of melodrama and history lesson which came to dominate middlebrow filmmaking in the 2000s and 2010s.
But what’s striking about this template is how little the best examples of the form have to do with it. Take The Theory of Everything, the 2014 Stephen Hawking film starring Eddie Redmayne, and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. While each tells the story of a great 20th-century scientific thinker, only the former, with its heavily spotlit central performance, Wikipedian structure and inoffensively pretty aesthetic belongs in the same drawer as Trumbo, Bohemian Rhapsody, The Imitation Game and Invictus.
Nolan’s film, meanwhile, would splinter any drawer you tried to cram it in: part of what makes Oppenheimer so exhilarating is the extent to which everything it does feels indivisible from everything it’s about.
Hence the extremely varied list of films below. Truly great biopics can be made in any style going, from musical to Western; they can slavishly cleave to the facts or capture their subject more impressionistically, with all the slants and ambiguities that film allows.
To select the best 40, I set just three ground rules. One: the films should be thought of first and foremost as accounts of an actual person’s life and work, so no veiled portrayals like The Master, or alternate histories like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Two: their chief focus should be one or two specific individuals, rather than broader historical moments (sorry, The Zone of Interest). And three: they should be dramatised, if only because factoring in documentaries would render the task impossible.
I then immediately broke all of these repeatedly, though have chosen to see this as being testament to how hard the form is to pin down when at its best. So here are my 40 favourite films this probably-not-really-a-genre has to offer, spanning almost a century from a silent-era classic to Nolan’s Best Picture favourite.
Dexter Fletcher’s irrepressible jukebox musical follows Elton John from childhood to pop immortality, pulling no punches as it mines every hit for maximum biographical import. And Taron Egerton’s lead performance as the former Reginald Dwight might be the best modern example of the ‘immersive’ lead turn: while he looks and sounds the part, it’s Elton’s spirit that’s truly unmistakable.
Perhaps unfairly, compassion isn’t a word that’s usually associated with the films of David Lynch. But the Mulholland Drive auteur reflects with unusual directness on our need for dignity and capacity for empathy in this murkily atmospheric recounting of the unhappy plight of the disfigured Victorian John (or in real life, Joseph) Merrick. The extraordinary central turn from John Hurt was among his best-ever work, despite the prosthetics that rendered him personally unrecognisable: per Lynch’s aim all along, though, his humanity shines through.
If the music-star biopic has become one of the form’s most cliché-ridden subtypes, it’s probably because so many took their cue from Michael Apted’s superb retelling of the rise of country singer Loretta Lynn, which more or less perfected the now conventional approach straight off. With its spellbindingly wide-ranging lead performance from Sissy Spacek – who also sings all the numbers herself – it’s an absorbingly low-key rags-to-riches drama with dirt under its fingernails, and a turbulent love story between the brilliant but vulnerable Lynn and her husband Doolittle (Tommy Lee Jones) at its core.
It may be pretty unfashionable now, but Hugh Hudson’s account of the friendship between two British runners at the 1924 Olympics, the Scottish evangelical Christian Eric Liddell and the Cambridge-educated Jew Harold Abrahams, is shot through with a courage and sincerity that’s been too rarely seen in cinema since its release. It’s a beautiful film about the value of faith and, perhaps even more so, the power of history – both the making of it and the living up to it. And of course, the immortal Vangelis soundtrack lends its otherwise grounded drama a cosmic edge.
Who killed Karen Silkwood? That was the title of the nonfiction book about the life and mysterious death, in 1974, of the Oklahoman nuclear whistleblower – and the question left hanging at the end of Mike Nichols’s tense dramatisation of that work, which furnished Meryl Streep with the first of her now vast catalogue of true-life roles. Streep vanishes into this rich and gently eccentric everywoman role, written for her by Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen, and almost certainly would have won the Best Actress Oscar, if she hadn’t just swiped it the year before for Sophie’s Choice.
Pablo Larraín’s shattered-glass portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy gives us a never-better Natalie Portman as the former First Lady – who suddenly finds herself as the postwar American dream’s final hold-out, grappling with a strange and troubling new order in the wake of her husband’s death.
New Zealand’s Jane Campion made a second impressive foray into biographical terrain in 2009 with her gauzily beautiful Bright Star, about the romance between the poets John Keats and Fanny Brawne. But her first, nearly two decades earlier, was the film that brought her to international attention: an often bleak, always skeweringly beautiful portrait of her countrywoman, the author Janet Frame, crowned by a barnstorming performance from Kerry Fox. It’s a wise and sympathetic film about the toll life can take on a great creative mind – conjured from one which, back then, was just getting started.
The Wikipedia-tab approach to the biopic was resoundingly rejected avant la lettre by France’s Maurice Pialat in this chronicle of the Dutch master’s final 67 days, under the care of his patron Dr Gachet in Auvers-sur-Oise. With the title role played by Jacques Dutronc, it’s less a film about an artist’s life than his approach to death: the largely apocryphal events include a frolic at a Parisian brothel and an extramarital romance with Gachet’s comely daughter. Viewers hoping in vain for greatest-hit glimpses of Sunflowers, Starry Night and so on should be more than compensated by Pialat’s own gorgeously painterly compositions.
Was this the moment the biopic finally wobbled off the mantelpiece and broke? After the 1980s yielded so many stridently definitive-feeling movies about Great Lives, François Girard dropped into his audience’s lap a shoebox full of shards – interviews, reenactments, even animation – that suggested a life’s greatness might partly rest on its inability to be so neatly framed. Playing the great pianist himself is Colm Feore, whom we never actually see touch his instrument’s keys.
From Che Guevara to Liberace, the ever-busy Steven Soderbergh has been repeatedly and fruitfully inspired by remarkable real lives. But foremost among them is this crowd-delighting underdog legal drama, which gave Julia Roberts one of her greatest ever roles: a vehicle for her matchless movie-star glamour which was prepared to veer thrillingly off-road.
Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao-hsien crafted this tale of the venerable glove puppeteer Li Tien-lu on the knife-edge of documentary and drama, intermixing showcases of the 84-year-old’s performances with his first-person reflections on the past and reenacted scenes from his turbulent early life. With supreme delicacy, Taiwan’s own troubled past emerges as a parallel plot line, as occupation and war shape this unassuming master’s art.
Terence Davies’s career ended with a magnificent diptych of poets’ lives: 2015′s A Quiet Passion, about Emily Dickinson, and this heartbroken chronicle of Siegfried Sassoon’s post-WWII driftings, starring a superb Jack Lowden, in which old wars – global, emotional and spiritual – take their toll.
David Fincher – coming soon – may have set the stage, but no film has yet pinned down the lunacy of social media more astutely than Janicza Bravo’s dramatisation of a viral 2015 Twitter thread, in which Aziah King, a 19-year-old waitress and part-time stripper, breathlessly recalled a chaotic Florida road trip.
Both pen and sword prove equally mighty in Paul Schrader’s delirious recounting of the life and work of the Japanese author Yukio Mishima, which mixes expressionistic excerpts from three of his novels with soberer episodes from his younger years and the day of his death. It’s an obsessive film about obsession, framing its subject as the sort of ideologically fixated warrior-monk figure that Schrader has been drawn to time and again – in his scripts for Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, and almost everything else he’d go on to direct.
Drawn from the original court transcripts, but strikingly shorn of historical context and even plot, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s dramatisation of the trial of the 15th-century French martyr stands today as perhaps the definitive example of silent cinema as art. Unfolding almost entirely in close-up, the film lingers especially on lead actress Renée Falconetti, whose transporting facial flickers of agony and ecstasy is more or less the power of the movies distilled. The film has a justifiably daunting academic reputation, but seen in a cinema it remains a primally moving experience.
The lives of holy fools make up a sizeable chunk of Werner Herzog’s filmography, but the Bavarian maverick perhaps found the ultimate example in Carlos Fitzcarrald, a Peruvian rubber baron who once had his steamship hauled over a mountain range as a short-cut of sorts to rich new terrain. Altering Fitzcarrald’s nationality to Irish, Herzog eventually cast (after a few false starts) his regular collaborator Klaus Kinski: the four-year shoot in the Amazon was pure hell, but the results stand as the mad pinnacle of the pair’s collective endeavours. Perhaps the film only feels complete as a work once you add in Les Blank’s accompanying documentary, Burden of Dreams, which positions Herzog as a mirror Fitzcarrald, manically pursuing (in the German director’s own words) a conquest of the useless.
Is Barbra Streisand’s first film – William Wyler’s belted-to-the-rafters adaptation of a Broadway musical in which she’d recently starred – about the life and career of the early 20th-century actress and comedian Fanny Brice? Or is it actually just about Barbra Streisand? It’s a sort of trick mirror biopic, whose supposed subject both buttresses and comes refracted through the nascent Streisand screen persona, which springs onto the screen here virtually fully formed. It’s a proper, old-fashioned tour de force in which Streisand’s enormous talents feel about as impossible to resist as an oncoming oil tanker, rendering all possible objections futile: Don’t Rain on My Parade is about right.
In 1963, the fraudster Akira Nishiguchi embarked on a killing spree that gripped Japan, as he evaded capture for more than two months. Shōhei Imamura’s transfixingly nasty adaptation of Nishiguchi’s life story unfolds like an investigation, starting with the arrest, then tracking back through the murders themselves to his childhood and early adult life, and finally to their unhappy aftermath. The killings are nihilistically pointless – random yet precise – with the great Ken Ogata (also the star of Mishima, just above) horribly plausible as the everyday nobody who carries them out with icy detachment.
Bob Fosse’s final film, about the murder of Playboy model Dorothy Stratten by her husband Paul Snider, dismayed many critics on its release. No wonder: it’s a deeply creepy, prurient and discomfiting watch, but only because Fosse so successfully harnesses and weaponises the male desire on which Stratten’s career, and ultimately also demise, were fed. Marielle Hemingway is superb in the title role, but Eric Roberts gives the performance of his career as Snider, laying bare the part self-loathing, part self-gratifying pimp mentality that lies at the heart of the exploitation dynamic.
There’s no such thing as easy Derek Jarman, but his mid-career portrait of the Baroque Italian painter serves as a ravishing summation of his favourite subjects: gay desire and identity, and their non-negotiable intersection with the creative process. With Dexter Fletcher and Nigel Terry as the wanton artist himself, and Sean Bean and Tilda Swinton as his principal lovers and muses, it’s a woozily beautiful watch, in which dreamy late Renaissance tableaux are playfully peppered with idiosyncrasies – a motorbike here, a solar-powered calculator there – that cock a snook at the sort of filmic literal-mindedness to which Jarman’s career was a rousing rebuke.
The Holocaust film is a peculiar sub-genre of its own, with rules, foibles and flaws that were recently laid bare by Jonathan Glazer’s fearlessly convention-defying The Zone of Interest. But the form was perhaps perfected by Steven Spielberg in this monumental work, which cast Liam Neeson as the German industrialist who at astonishing personal risk saved the lives of more than a thousand Jews during the Holocaust.
Greta Garbo found one of her career-defining roles in this radiant pre-Code period piece about the 17th-century Swedish monarch, who engages in an affair with John Gilbert’s dusky Spanish envoy during a clandestine cross-dressing excursion from the palace. Director Rouben Mamoulian foregrounds the sensuality and poise of Garbo’s performance: there’s an incredible scene in which she “memorises” the room in which she and Gilbert make love, stroking and nuzzling its surfaces in order to better remember the encounter later on. It’s a wonderfully unabashed wave of early Hollywood horniness, made just before the strictures of the Hays Code bit.
After blowing the whistle on Big Tobacco corruption, Jeffrey Wigand’s life turned into a real-world paranoid thriller – so who better to bring it to the screen than Michael Mann? The Heat director’s steely command of the push-pull between action and tension, and note-perfect use of Russell Crowe and Al Pacino as Wigand and the TV news producer who draws out his secrets, makes this a model hunted-man film for the corporate age.
Martin Scorsese (whom we’ll be hearing about again shortly) commenced the late-late period of his career with this magisterial crime epic about mafia hitman Frank Sheeran, which recasts 20th-century American politics and capitalism as the ultimate criminal enterprise. Bringing together Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino for the first time only enhanced the sense of the inexorable turning of hefty historical wheels.
At the same time that Scorsese was reinventing the true-life crime film – again, more of him below – Warren Beatty and director Barry Levinson mounted this glittering throwback about Ben ‘Bugsy’ Siegel, the American mobster who essentially conceived of Las Vegas as we know it. Dripping with glamour and romance (Beatty’s future wife Annette Bening co-stars as his moll Virginia Hill), the film positions Siegel as a classic starry-eyed American dreamer, and his garish, seductive vision a shining monument to a now sadly long-lost type.
The austere pseudo-documentary style of Peter Watkins’s three-hour film about the Norwegian expressionist painter has a time-capsule quality: it’s if the British director had spent a decade wandering around with Munch himself, soaking up the surrounding details of his life and times in order to better pry open his subject. But it’s in his arrangement of this supposed ‘raw material’ – in non-linear whirls and eddies that circle recurring moments and motifs – that a full, cumulatively shattering sense of his subject’s genius emerges.
In which David Fincher pinpoints the precise moment the 21st-century online rot set in. On its release, this snaking account of the founding of Facebook was frequently described as a modern-day Citizen Kane – an excitable comparison then, but one which has aged troublingly well. Unforgettably played by Jesse Eisenberg, the site’s supremo Mark Zuckerberg is a storm of vindictive, grievance-mongering egotism, setting the tone for the media era ahead.
Mike Leigh’s 1999 film Topsy-Turvy, about Gilbert and Sullivan’s writing of The Mikado, was instantly acclaimed as among his very finest work. But he went on to top it with this later character study of the great Romantic painter, starring a made-for-the-role Timothy Spall, which evoked an even richer sense of time and place while capturing the weird, spluttery flow of English Victorian artistic genius.
A great many films have been made about Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and the notorious 1881 gunfight at the OK Corral, but John Ford’s rivetingly beautiful and melancholic take on the circumstances that led to this legendary shoot-out remains the first and last word. Ford’s meticulous compositions have the enveloping, shadowy romance of Rembrandt canvases – you’d swear you were actually standing in that saloon, gazing helplessly at Linda Darnell while the spilled beer pulls at the soles of your boots – while the rich, fraternal chemistry between Henry Fonda’s Earp and Victor Mature’s Holliday is utterly addictive.
Sofia Coppola serves up the last days of Versailles as a silver platter of iced buns, brilliantly blurring the lines between period pageant and pop-art blowout. This caused a storm at its 2006 Cannes premiere, not least for the pair of Converse trainers included in the young Queen’s shoe collection, but Coppola and her then 22-year-old lead Kirsten Dunst are in teenage nose-thumbing mode here, giving the grandeur of the plot an itchy modern resonance.
Or perhaps that should be Salieri. Peter Shaffer’s masterstroke, in this screen adaptation of his 1979 stage play, was to centre the action on his title character’s less gifted contemporary – making it both a gripping portrayal of artistic rivalry and a portrait of genius at a maddening remove. Directing F Murray Abraham and Tom Hulce as Salieri and Mozart, the frustrated journeyman and the wayward young prodigy, Miloš Forman revels in the comic mash-up of grandeur and pettiness that characterised the pair’s bitter (and entirely fictional) feud.
Denzel Washington and Spike Lee hit the heights of their respective powers with this sweeping whole-life civil rights epic. A notoriously troubled production (work on the script began in 1968), the immense scale Lee insisted on for his near-three-and-a-half hour opus turned out to be its secret weapon. There was room for blazing audacity, but also the nuanced humanity of Washington’s fully inhabited performance, and the result arguably brought about a shift in public thinking about its then highly controversial subject.
For a subject as elusive and multi-faceted as Bob Dylan, Todd Haynes found the ideal approach: multiple Dylans played by half a dozen actors in a kaleidoscopic series of vignettes suggested by his life and work. Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, Ben Whishaw, Marcus Carl Franklin – you wouldn’t necessarily cast a single one of them to definitively play the singer-songwriter, but through this lattice of evasions, Haynes dazzlingly triangulates a higher truth.
Tim Burton’s affectionate, excitable tribute to the king of the 1950s Z-grade B-movie is exactly the upside-down achievement it should be: a terrific film about the man responsible for some of the worst ever made. Easily the strongest of Burton’s eight collaborations with Johnny Depp, it captures vintage Hollywood in all its glamour and shabbiness, and makes a strong case for noble failure as the ultimate outsider art.
What its titular physicist, played by an ideally cast Cillian Murphy, did to the atom, Nolan’s film does to the biopic itself: it thrillingly smashes the form wide open, sending pure cinematic energy arcing back and forth through history and reframing the detonation of the A-bomb as the definitive postmodern act. For such a recent release, this is admittedly placed perilously high on the list, but while its ranking might settle with time, it feels (to me, anyway) like one for the ages.
The Japanese aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi was the unlikely subject of this late Studio Ghibli historical epic, which wove its subject’s wartime travails into the plot of an unrelated prewar novel by Tatsuo Hori. This was Hayao Miyazaki’s Powell and Pressburger film: a state-of-the-nation masterpiece with thrillingly personal stakes.
Guilt and redemption are the cornerstones of so many of Martin Scorsese’s films – and in this blistering monochrome drama, which tells of the rise and fall of one-time middleweight boxing champion Jake LaMotta, the two are to be found hand in padded glove. Robert De Niro, on mesmerising career-best form, shows us LaMotta as a fallen man whose punishment in the ring is the cost of his own conduct outside it. Both sinner and saviour, he’s fighting demons of the internal variety; his own body the battleground, his own blood the sacrament.
There are visionary filmmakers and then there is Andrei Tarkovsky, whose mostly made-up account of the life of the 15th-century icon painter is conceived on a scale so thunderous it would make even God gulp. This is medieval Russia as a promenade epic; our hero stumbling through a battle and corruption-scarred landscape as the Tatar invasions rage.
We can now only think of gangster movies as having been made before or after Goodfellas, but Martin Scorsese’s live-wire masterpiece touches together the now and the then with a thousand-volt frizz. On one hand, there’s the seemingly liveable fantasy that entices Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill into a life of organised crime: on the other, the increasingly jittery present in which that life must chaotically unfold. Adapted from Nicholas Pileggi’s Wiseguy, a 1985 book about Hill’s hair-raising transition from Mafia associate to FBI informant, it finds one of our greatest filmmakers working at a level few others have ever equalled – and, better still, making it look like a breeze.
It might be the most famous cut in all of cinema: a match snuffed out by a single puff from Peter O’Toole’s parted lips becomes the sun heaving itself above the desert horizon. This flourish from editor Anne V Coates in David Lean’s head, heart and soul-spinning epic about the life of TE Lawrence has been (rightly) praised to death, but it’s still the best summation of the film’s unassailable greatness. Intimacy meets immensity in a single breath: that’s life itself on film, and no one has surpassed it.
From where to get the best view to when the roads will close.